These females drive us crazy. They are constantly in our ear. They hover around us. They irritate us. Sometimes we have to slap them in order to cool them out. I’ve chased them down. I’ve killed them with my bare hands. I’ve killed dozens, maybe hundreds in an effort to have some peace and quiet. And still they come at me. They are insatiable. They will not be stopped until they bleed me dry. I just murdered another one. Good riddance you little bitch.

I’m speaking, of course, about female mosquitos, Aedes aegypti in particular. I’ve been learning a lot about the tiny insects over the last few months, what with all the hysteria about the Zika virus as well as a host of other deadly pathogens that these little vampires carry, like Dengue fever and Yellow fever. What I never realized, because I’m a dumb male, is that only female mosquitos bite. The male mosquitos sit around and eat leaves all day like new age hippies. They are a peaceful gender, all about the love. It’s the bloodthirsty females that plague us humans, drinking our veins with impunity, spreading disease faster than a nineteenth century California whorehouse during a gold strike.

The World Health Organization ranks mosquitos as the deadliest non-human species on the planet, which is kind of funny and kind of not that they have to use the non-human qualifier, because we homo sapiens kill the hell out of everything. Ask the cows on their way to the slaughterhouse what the most dangerous animal is, and you’ll get a resounding “moo,” which translated means, “that two legged bastard in the overalls with the vicious snarl on his face and the big pointy hook in his hand. Mosquitos? Who cares about the mosquitos.”

And not mosquitos, but female mosquitos at that. They are worse than the Nazis. Even with our notorious and terrifying female lineup of A-list killers–Medea (the Greek one, not the Tyler Perry one), Aileen Wuornos, Mary Cotton, Lizzy Borden, Elizabeth Bathory the Hungarian blood countess, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, actually all the women in Kill Bill, Typhoid Mary, Helen Keller (who edits this stuff? Helen Keller? What the shit?) Jodie Arias, Casey Anthony (Oops, not guilty) Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Those two teenage girls from Wisconsin who pledged their allegiance to the Slender Man, all the Manson women, and the strumpet in the red dress who got John Dillinger killed outside that movie theater–our women pale in comparison to the pain and suffering unleashed around the world by tiny skeeters. They’ve killed millions of people. It has gotten so bad that even a coalition of male mosquitos recently released a statement…

“It has come to our attention that you are currently researching methods to wipe us off the planet. This is distressing for obvious reasons. What have we men ever done to you? Don’t get angry at us. It’s our wives that cause all the problems. We try to talk to them but they don’t listen. They are stubborn. Women, right? Tell you what. You don’t genetically program us for extinction, and we promise we’ll only swarm on Al Qaeda and bad reality TV stars. Deal?”

So I learned something about mosquitos. The other misconception I’ve been operating under is that mummies, animated corpses wrapped in bandages, don’t have any rhythm. They know nothing about funk music. Again, I’ve been proven wrong. I was invited to a concert last weekend at the Dragon Con convention at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. The band’s name is “Here Come the Mummies.” True to the title, they arrived dressed as mummies. I agreed to go simply because I had been reading about the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and saw the connection with rocking Egyptian mummies, even if they are from Nashville. I expected a thrash metal band or something like it, and was none too surprised when they took off like George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. I could write a whole other blog about Dragon Con itself, but suffice it to say that when the sci-fi convention is in town it makes Atlanta look like the Death Star crash-landed into Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. When Chewbacca, a bunch of X-men, and Harry Potter are all dancing as a group of mummies rock the house, it is hard to know who is entertaining whom. In fact the weirdest person there was me, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt I got at the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen. When I thought about it I should’ve known that mummies could groove. I was suddenly reminded of that other funky smash, “King Tut” by Steve Martin. Always one of my favorites. The mummies come through the crowd like a drum line in a marching band, and they are as tight as Amenhotep’s tomb.

I had filled up on a couple of growlers of Flying Dog’s Gonzo Imperial Porter, ABV 9% and, good and drunk, was feeling the music. The mummies rock. Go see them if you have the chance.

After the show I went outside to get some air, the high gravity beer coursing through my veins. That’s when I noticed a girlie mosquito had alighted on my arm and was feeding. Fighting the urge to smash the little insect, I did my best to remain calm. This is a mother we’re talking about here. She is doing all the work. Taking all the risk. She has got kids to think about. Momentary discomfort for me, sustenance for an entire little insect family. Never let it be said that Paddy the Duke lacks compassion.

I smacked her to death only because it is highly irresponsible for pregnant women to drink alcohol.